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Sonic Generator
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Sonic Generator, a new-music ensemble. Tuesday at Georgia Tech University’s Alumni House.
It’s a rough life, being a classical-music professional. Fidelity to the letter of the composer’s score is essential, of course. So the three musicians dutifully downed mouthfuls of Pinot Noir, chimed notes on the sides of their wine glasses and uttered nonsense syllables.
As much a performance-art installation as a piece of music, “You Can’t See the Forest … Music” was written in 1971 by Daniel Lentz, a West Coast composer now living in New Mexico. It was a highlight of Sonic Generator’s concert Tuesday at Georgia Tech’s Alumni House.
As the musicians drank, chimed and babbled, their sounds were being recorded and — a key element of the score — replayed over loudspeakers with a bit of compression and delay. Slowly, the syllables coalesced into addages — “Don’t put the cart before the horse,” “Birds of a feather” and so on — backed by the rising ping from the emptied wine glasses.
Marvelously, comically, the piece works by presenting the common and the banal — the wine, the language — in a formal concert setting with a clever resolution and a strong visual component. The blurring of music, visual art and technology was, in fact, the theme of the show, where every piece required a lengthy explanation of materials and methods so as to not baffle the audience.
Sonic Generator is ensemble-in-residence at Georgia Tech and draws its personnel mostly from Atlanta Symphony Orchestra musicians. This ensures dedicated, virtuosic performances of even the wackiest, most complex scores. The trio of Tom Sherwood (normally a percussionist), Brad Ritchie (a cellist) and Ted Gurch (a clarinetist) likely set a new benchmark for the speaker-drinker genre.
The evening started with George Lewis’ “North Star Boogaloo” (1996), a one-man work for percussion and pre-recorded tape, based on a poem by Quincy Troupe. Sherwood first gave us the background: the North Star as a beacon for escaped slaves, basketball as a modern-day North Star for inner city kids, the fusion of language and rhythm as a foundation of music. Over its 15-minutes, the work held many interesting moments, as when a snippet of Troupe’s voice was put on a loop, accompanied by Sherwood’s funky-groove drumming. But if there was a deeper message to the poem or the music, it was lost in the disjointed sonic collage. Maybe the collage itself was the art.
George Crumb’s famous “Vox Balaenae” (“The Voice of the Whale,” from 1971) is a trio for piano, flute and cello — Lisa Leong, Jessica Peek Sherwood and Ritchie, respectively — here accompanied by a real-time video created on the spot by Al Matthews. With spare, computer-manipulated images of humpback whales in the sea, and Crumb’s serene and haunting music, the result was like a wordless video opera — enlivening old music with new technologies.
Jason Freeman, an assistant professor at Tech and director of Sonic Generator, programmed his own “Graph Theory,” an interactive, Web-based composition for violin. Freeman created 60 musical fragments or cells; visitors to the site (http://turbulence.org/Works/graphtheory) manipulate the cells, and each day the computer tabulates the changes to create a new piece. For the low-tech performance, Helen Hwaya Kim printed out a recent version and played it on her violin. Who gets credit as composer, Freeman or the Web users?
Jennifer Walshe’s “Meanwhile, back at the ranch …” asked the same who’s-the-creator questions. The Irish composer didn’t write any musical notes but rather a 25-page instruction manual.
It went like this: an “image controller” slapped a drawing on an overhead projector, then drew symbols guiding what each of the five musicians was supposed to do. The players then riffed on the imagery. A comic-book drawing of Archie getting hit on the head with a football drew a variety of goofy sounds, including Ritchie playing a long, slow glissando, approximating on his cello the sound of a falling bomb.
A scene from “The Simpsons” of bully Nelson punching dweeb Milhouse prompted the expected thwacks and loopy, cartoonish accompaniment. Cheap but fun entertainment, to be sure, and proof that technology doesn’t make art better, it just opens up more possibilites, for better and worse.
— ASO Weekend —
Starting tonight, the ASO spends the weekend on one composer, Felix Mendelssohn , with three of his most appealing works. The “Scottish” Symphony and Violin Concerto are perennial concert-hall favorites. The short opener, “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” revisits two Goethe poems that Beethoven had set just a few years earlier — tapping Mendelssohn’s elegant, zesty and imaginative ability to convert visual images and emotional states into sound. For the ASO, this is core repertoire. What should be striking about the performance is the attitude of conductor Nicholas McGegan. A period-instrument specialist and a regular guest in Atlanta, he approaches the early Romantics as a sort of end point. Mendelssohn (1809-1847) isn’t the precursor to the classically-minded Brahms and Tchaikovsky of the late 19th century. Instead, he’s a young composer with the sounds of the 18th century’s Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven in his ears.
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